Data science ethics
Lecture 11
Duke University
STA 199 - Fall 2022
October 4, 2022
Stand your ground
In 2005, the Florida legislature passed the controversial “Stand Your Ground” law that broadened the situations in which citizens can use lethal force to protect themselves against perceived threats. Advocates believed that the new law would ultimately reduce crime; opponents feared an increase in the use of lethal force.
What does the following visualization, published by the news service Reuters on February 16, 2014, say about the number of firearm murders in Florida over the years?
COVID cases
In May 2020, the state of Georgia published the following visualization. What does this plot say about the number of COVID cases in the most impacted counties?
Machine Bias
2016 ProPublica article on algorithm used for rating a defendant’s risk of future crime:
In forecasting who would re-offend, the algorithm made mistakes with black and white defendants at roughly the same rate but in very different ways.
The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.
White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants.
Risk score errors
What is common among the defendants who were assigned a high/low risk score for reoffending?
Risk scores
How can an algorithm that doesn’t use race as input data be racist?
Goggle translate
